Posted
by
EditorDavid
on Sunday August 20, 2017 @01:34PM
from the fun-with-fundraisers dept.

DMJC writes: George Oldziey, the music composer from Wing Commander 3 and 4, is running a Kickstarter campaign to re-orchestrate the music from the venerable series. The Kickstarter is in its final week and has approximately $2000 left to go before it reaches it's goal.
Oldziey shares some history on his web site:
In 2014 I launched a Kickstarter campaign to document the music I created for the Wing Commander games in the way I had originally imagined it: for full orchestra and chorus. 588 generous supporters helped me reach my goal! In late 2014 I traveled to Bratislava, Slovakia, where the 95-piece Slovak National Symphony Orchestra and the 40-voice Lucina Chorus recorded this music under my supervision.
But last November -- and again in June -- Oldziey unsuccessfully tried raising funds on Kickstarter to record more of his Wing Commander music with a full orchestra. So this month's campaign sets a more modest goal of raising $15,000 "as a foundation and springboard from which to build with a more open ended crowdfunding campaign." It'll fund the creation of digital MIDI tracks for the new orchestral music plus a recording of the "jazzy bar music" from Wing Commander 3 (which will both be released as digital downloads and on CD). "Future campaign(s) will tackle the goal of getting a live orchestra to record everything..." Oldziey writes, adding this campaign "builds an exciting foundation to build on -- with some cool music to enjoy in the mean time!"

Two people have already pledged $600 to claim one of five high-end premiums in which George composes one minute of unique music just for them, and two more pledged $300 to attend the "jazzy bar music" recording session in Austin, Texas.

All this money and effort to gather real instruments and make a high quality recording, most likely to be listened to from a compressed MP3, further compressed by bluetooth, to wireless headphones with sound drivers powered by a tiny little battery.

One of my friends back in the day had some kind of classy stereo with some of those Bose wedge speakers hooked up to his PC. However accurate the sound isn't, it sounded amazing when something quality was fed into it. Retrogaming is a pretty big thing, these days.

If you're an audiophile who cares most about audio reproduction, then I'm sure you look down your nose at such things. I've heard a multi-thousand dollar stereo with cornerhorns, and yeah, you can tell the difference. It's lovely. But for that kind of money I'd buy a car or something

If you care more about quality than having the very latest, you can get somewhat older models much cheaper unless things have changed in the last 20 years. Back in the day, I bought a pair of JBL L90 for 2000 DM (about 1000 euro) when the recommended retail price a few years before was 5000 DM or 2500 Euro. And that was not unusual, other speakers with similar prices were similarly marked down after a few years.

Now speaker technology does not move that fast anymore, being fairly mature. So getting a somewha

Just create a new version of Wing Commander and tuck the cost of your symphony into that. It was a great game. Loved it as a child. Still want a good story driven space fighter that I can actually play on a modern computer.

Privateer was composed by a different team to George Sanger, Sanger was mostly involved in Wing Commander 1/2. Laura Barratt, Marc Schaefgen, and Nenad Vugrinec worked on Privateer. Each game in the series had a good soundtrack. I'd like to get the Privateer artists together to re-record the music now that technology has moved on from 1992. I have an SC-55 at home and Privateer sounds amazing on it, but I'd like to see what an orchestra/modern studio can do with it.